Thursday, 15 January 2015

Enemy (2013)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/Enemy_poster.jpg

Dir. Denis Villeneuve

For a film that desires to be
unconventional, I will start with the conclusion than go backwards. Enemy has a chance, hopefully, to grow
in favour for me when I return to it. Again, first opinions are always
problematic. The mind is fickle. But there is a clear aspect of the film which
is a flaw now. Enemy is incredibly
obvious as an attempt at a "strange" film and because of all the
other movies I've seen that have influenced it, it's very normal and sells its
premise short through trying to have this tone at quite a few points. The
strangest and most unnerving aspect is the character dynamics, rather than the
more openly obtuse content, of a history teacher Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovering he has a doppelganger, spotting an
extra in a film who looks exactly like him called Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal). It eventually reaches its most interesting
content by the third act, when the two learn of each other and infect each
other's lives including that of their other halves (Mélanie Laurent and Sarah
Gadon). To the point of a sexual favour being hinted at for one of the men
to take advantage of, it reaches the uncomfortable tone of David Cronenberg'sDead
Ringers (1988), the character drama standing out as the more interesting and
best content of Enemy. What feels
flawed is the more deliberately abstract content. The spider metaphors,
including the divisive final image, the conspiracy and political content etc.
do feel too overtly prioritised on a first viewing when the real meat is the
two doubles existing in a flux, where they switch roles and become difficult to
tell between, and the dynamics that spin out from it.

From http://www.beyondhollywood.com/uploads/2014/02/ENEMY_DAY25-0078.jpg

What means more, and is of
greater interest, is the performances and the psychological content. Gyllenhaal is in the position playing
two individuals who the viewer can represent as two sides of the same person as
well as separate people. At first, the narrative is of Adam the teacher
investigating his doppelganger Anthony, only for the shifting roles of the two,
and the involvement of Laurent as
Adam's lover Mary and Gadon as
Anthony's heavily pregnant wife Helen to take place. This leads to deliberate
blurring and implications that the film is the metaphor of a person split into
various roles through his sexual desires and boredom. A small cameo by Isabella Rossellini, always someone you
want appear in a film even in a cameo, is where this dualist issue is shown
further.

From http://thecriticalcritics.com/review/wp-content/images/enemy-still_1-350x245.jpg

As two people Gyllenhaal is exceptional. Adam and
Anthony are too similar to the discomfort for the character Helen, which
becomes of importance for her dramatic narrative too, but noticeable
differences in body language, without becoming heavy handed, are shown that
make the doppelgangers their own complicated people as well as potential halves
of each other. Adam cautious and hesitant, Anthony more confident in his
stride. It's not just their clothes and the materials around them that
represent their personalities - Anthony's motorbike as much part of his cocky
persona - but Gyllenhaal's admirable
performance as both, able to juggle two distinct characters in a film that
calls for questions to be raised, like for James
Steward in Vertigo (1958)
following Kim Novak's Madeleine, of whether Adam and Anthony are
actually the same man in a complicated little mind game. Because of the
character interactions involved in the drama, Mélanie Laurent and Sarah
Gadon are as of importance too. Unfortunately, Laurent is not given as much as she could've worked with; not just
because of her breakout performance in Inglourious
Basterds (2009) and the desire to see her act in more films, but because it
would've been as interesting, more dynamic, for Enemy to include her more in the narrative. Gadon on the other hand, visibly pregnant in real life on screen
and not just playing a pregnant woman, gets a lion's share of the drama which
she does well with. Like Geneviève Bujold
in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, her character is the one
stuck in the middle of doubles' interactions, offset further by a scene, adding
to the issue, where her husband Anthony is implicated for adultery, the
relationship of the two as much part of the dynamics at play. Interestingly,
narrowly avoiding this being a film which merely fetishes the sexuality held
over the female form, with a lot of sex and nudity for a film with a fifteen
certificate in the UK, Gadon's Helen
gets to be complicated because of the character dynamics involved, including a
great additional twist, just at the end, with spices things up with new
implications.

From http://nsa34.casimages.com/img/2013/08/29//130829105320681613.jpg

Enemy though is as much about the talked about spider symbolism and
many other things around this drama. Only ninety minutes, Enemy does end up devoting time to this material as much as the
central idea, the content around this centre leaving me ambivalent to the film
altogether. I have not read the original source novel The Double (2012) by José
Saramago, but I do know content like the spider motif was added for this
adaptation. The decision to be even more unconventional as a film beyond the
doppelganger narrative is both a virtue and a failure which will complicate my
attitude to Enemy. The decision for
a yellow based lighting and visual palette, with colours still present but dialled
down, places Enemy's setting into
that where all is not necessarily what it seems without being cliché, a
distinct visual look that balances the muted without becoming grotty. The rest
of this style, including some of the content, is divisive for me however. There
is a danger with films like this where filmmakers will use shorthand tropes to
develop a mood that are caught short if thought about for longer than a brief
minute. Particularly as director Denis
Villeneuve has placed himself in the area of cinema occupied by the likes
of David Lynch, he has set himself up
for comparison. The best example of the conflict of Enemy's quality is Danny
Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans'
score. The usher in the theatre I saw Enemy
at, who ripped my ticket, a younger woman, compared the score to that by Mica Levi's for Under The Skin (2013). Under
The Skin's music still haunts me from the beginning of last year and,
rather than using cheap effect, its texture hearing it in the cinema added a
dense quality to the visual content. The score for Enemy is at times a beautifully considered piece you can admire but
it can also feel too deliberate. There is a potential concern with this type of
current "oddball" cinema to use a term my mother coined, which Under The Skin stands above but Enemy is dangerously close to, where
scenes and events in these films seem more profound and artistically brilliant
only because of a shorthand like an industrial throbbing noise is layered over
the images rather than a synchronicity between visuals and audio.

From http://www.labutaca.net/imagenes/wp-content/original/2014_03/enemy-2013-imagen-2.jpg

This issue is the same with the
motifs and themes within the film. The spider motif feels arbitrary. Yes, there
is the potential metaphor that it represents Adam and Anthony's fear of women,
or the tangled webs woven by the narrative, but was it the best implementation
to have this metaphor in the first place? As much as it leads to photogenic and
poster friendly images, like a spider the size of a kaiju, it feels like excess
baggage that doesn't need to be there. The same is with the potential political
content. A lecture to Adam's history class, repeated twice, is about how
dictatorships deceive the populous. Again, it feels excessive when the inherent
idea of the doppelganger is political. Whether Adam and Anthony are the same
people or different individuals who become one, it's impossible to fight
against a dictatorship if one cannot control the different sides of your being.
That and the fact the two could represent the alternative sides of one man,
implicating the potential masks worn by people in a society. Finally there is a
subplot about a secret sex show club which opens the film. This has more
credibility in that it questions the reality of what is going on, or
complicates the character of Adam/Anthony depending on how you adjust your
thoughts on the film to include the material. Baring in mind that, on another
viewing, that all the aspects mentioned in this paragraph could work better when
revisited, it feels as if the film doesn't spread its main concerns further
enough especially as there's only ninety minutes to work with.

From http://images.ddlvalley.rocks/images/12317218695131663492.png

Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None): None

Enemy was the first of two projects between Denis Villeneuve and Jake
Gyllenhaal. The second film was the Hollywood film Prisoners (2013), with Hugh
Jackson, that was released first. Enemy
was designed by the director as an antidote for the potential compromises
for Prisoners as a more mainstream
film. Ironically, Prisoners is the
more unconventional film - with a more conventional narrative, the more
unconventional content, from Gyllenhaal
as a police detective named Loki, or a spine tingling scene involving a room
covered with travel cases on the floor, it becomes more striking as a film. Enemy with its spider motifs and dream
sequences mutes its own energy with its upfront oddness. This is a matter of
opinion, but the term 'weird' doesn't only mean the strange and bizarre, but
that which suggests the supernatural or eerie. Enemy is a good film, but its mood and tone which is significant
for my rating gauge as well as content, and Enemy doesn't have anything, for all its unconventional imagery,
that is inherently abstract.

From http://www.chud.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Enemy-2.jpg

Personal Opinion:

Enemy is my first viewing experience for 2015. I've decided to
concentrate on those so called "oddball" films, like Enemy, or films I have a minimum of a
high interest in to see at a cinema or at all, because I want to be frugal with
money, even if I was a rich man, and as a cineaste, you don't have to confirm
it by watching films for the sake of it. So I start with Enemy, wide eyed from how good Prisoners
was, with the hope for an abstract movie par excellence. Frankly, it fits
between being an underrated work of interest, a slow burner, and a minor work
of immense interest. The expectation for it, the promise, is always a problem
when encountering a film that doesn't immediately stand out, and has flaws to
it, the emotion flippant. I cannot help but compare Enemy to many films in the same company - Lynch, Cronenberg,
countless mindbenders - and it does feel minor in comparison in my mind as it
is currently.

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"I could go on for hours with more examples. The list is endless. You probably never gave it a thought, but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason. And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason." - Rubber (2010)

About Me

I am 28 years old and hail from England. For the last few years I have been a growing fan of cinema and have decided to take the next step into blogging about it and any other tangents that about the things I'm interested in I get onto.